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Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest-growing #insurtechs and most innovative #insurance carriers and brokers. New episodes weekly.
Episodes
Tuesday Dec 29, 2020
Tuesday Dec 29, 2020
"People Make Up Our Clients' Happiness Just as Much as the Product Does".
Meet Dustin Yoder, CEO at Sureify (The Digital Bridge Between Life and Annuity Carriers and their Customers) which took four years to get rolling from an initial B2C to today's B2B2C SaaS model. Insurance may have felt archaic at the time, but for Dustin who grew up in an insurance household, he was comfortable diving into it.
There are three characteristics Dustin Yoder lives by, and chooses people for:
🎭Relationships (how you build trust and get referrals)
🪓Grit (how you keep making those next steps), and
🥋Curiosity (how you need to prove something)
Insurtech Leadership Podcast airs weekly, hosted by Joshua R. Hollander giving you up-close personal insights from the leaders of the fastest growing #Insurtechs and most innovative carriers and brokers.
Tuesday Dec 22, 2020
Tuesday Dec 22, 2020
Cory Isaacson had built ad run several major software businesses and filed 5 Patents before he started ReThought Insurance. This time he sat down with a venture partner and wrote down exactly what he wanted to achieve and the market opportunity that would become ReThought. He hand-picked his co-founders based on their common beliefs and deep subject-matter expertise in insurance.
According to Cory, "If you start with a Big Vision and Big Dream you make it a lot longer and more successfully than those who just start with How do I make a Profit Today."
ReThought engineers solutions for the larger property business around climate risk. Cory built the team from the concept of treating employees as long-term stakeholders in the business, using diversity to strengthen resiliency in the organization and with a focus on high ethics.
Insurtech Leadership Podcast airs weekly, hosted by Joshua R. Hollander giving you up-close personal insights from the leaders of the fastest growing insurtechs and most innovative carriers and brokers.
Monday Dec 14, 2020
Monday Dec 14, 2020
Jennifer Carroll, CEO at Veruna, Inc, is a Technologist & Attorney based in Austin. She has a unique leadership story. Unlike most Insurtech Founder-CEOs, she was asked by the Board to join in early 2020 when she was strategic advisor on growth plans.
Veruna is creating an agency management system for the modern age, access and report on your data, independent brokers and MGAs.
Changes she’s brought as new CEO:
- Prioritizing people to have time with families and moving around during the day
- Small team segments creating ownership & confidence to execute goals in your immediate sphere of influence
- Attracting people with high resiliency you want at a tech startup, high energy and creative, persistent to get answers right who want to make a big difference in the industry
Challenges for a new CEO:
- Spends a lot more time explaining yourself and ideas, mentoring team leads to think startups
- Gives small assignments and articles, leadership exercises, grow them into leaders
- Driving leaders to become metrics-driven, observing the data and asking better questions to improve the product
Insurtech Leadership Podcast gives you up-close insights from the leaders of the fastest growing insurtechs and most innovative carriers and brokers. We air weekly and are hosted by Josh Hollander, CEO Horton N.A. an executive search firm. Join up on LinkedIn!
Tuesday Dec 08, 2020
Tuesday Dec 08, 2020
Today's episode is a series of short lessons on applying AI to Insurtech from software veteran Larry Lafferty. Veloxiti deploys a genius business model strategy, where they start with AI for Dept. of Defense to produce the R&D and first versions of products, then moves them to a separate company that commercializes and productizes the AI tech into the various vertical use cases like Insurance.
4 Critical Lessons for any SaaS Software business in 2021:
🚣🏽♂️AI Is Software: Media does us a disfavor portraying AI as experimental and not able to do anything of value. But AI is just software: you have to get the data right, you have to get the requirements right, and you have to create an experience that really rings the user’s bell.
🍿Create Authentic Demand: It’s easy for organizations to set out o build and follow the excitement of building a solution, but unless there is authentic demand for that new product, users will find a way to sabotage it. Bringing AI into Insurtech means understanding exactly what your users need.
☀️"Agile" Development Shines on Virtual Teams: As a development organisation a team doing Agile means a stand-up every day 10-15 min trying to identify issues or problems, organizing the work into 2-3 week sprints (a unit of work for the team as a whole) with a customer review at the end of each sprint. Being truly Agile works really well in a remote distributed environment.
🌴The Tree That Bends: Have an informal hierarchy with about 1/4 of the team experienced as team leaders. All of those people are hands-on engineers and have the ability to lead teams. They build resilience by making it possible for a large number of people to step into the project leadership role. There are no strict boundaries, and expectation that everyone will pitch in to do whatever needs to be done.
Insurtech Leadership Podcast is hosted by Joshua R. Hollander with Season 1 focused on #resilience and #humanresources be sure to 👆🏽SignUp! as we continue featuring weekly episodes with CEOs and Insurance executives you need to get to know to succeed in the coming decade of Insurtech 2020-2030.
Tuesday Dec 01, 2020
Tuesday Dec 01, 2020
Meet Dr. Kyshun Webster, CEO of Compassion Society Benefits, who is bringing a new diversity of ideas & perspectives to change insurance. His MGA focuses on creating new insurance models around the growing demands of 21st century families.
Dr. Webster is driven by his upbringing as a New Orleans native who grew up in single-parent home, where he learned at a young age the need to address the wage loss for family care-givers. In his own words, "We bring together digital natives, industry veterans and social entrepreneurs that all converge to bring a real heart to insurance."
Real examples of the societal changes taking place right now:
🏃🏾♂️ 70% of workers who leave jobs cite care-giving and being caught between daily obligations and their job,
👜 During Covid for the first time the federal government required companies to pay people to take time off to care for others,
👩👦👦Also during Covid, when given the choice between working a low-wage job or opting for unemployment, many caregivers chose to stay on unemployment.
What's Insurance got to do with it? As industry veterans retire and a new generation of more diverse people take the helm, new business models will be created based on a new set of beliefs. Historically, insurance has excluded smaller, lower-income markets. There is an opportunity for a financial inclusivity for those who have been left behind but have a clear willingness to protect their assets and loved ones.
💰 If we can apply the processes of legacy insurance to this new opportunity, we could create a new multi-billion industry.
Insurtech Leadership Podcast is hosted by Joshua R. Hollander with Season 1 focused on #resilience and #humanresources be sure to 👆🏽SignUp! as we continue featuring weekly episodes with CEOs and Insurance executives you need to get to know to succeed in the coming decade of Insurtech 2020-2030.
Tuesday Nov 24, 2020
Tuesday Nov 24, 2020
How different is building a business in Canada versus the Valley or New York? Today's episode with Ian Jeffrey, Founder & CEO at Breath Life tells a story of relishing these different perspectives:
Competition for Talent and Money
Sure there's more talent and investors in the valley, but the competition for those resources is fierce,
Try retaining that deep experienced talent in the valley when they realize you're not the next Facebook, versus
Building a business with people who are attracted and committed to your vision and values,
Customers and Profitability
Building a business without any thought about profitability (valley), versus
Building a business for actual paying customers,
Timing
Building a business far ahead of its time and hoping to sell-out, versus
Building a business whose time is now and operating it profitably
These and more lessons of serial entrepreneurship applied to the wild lands of insurtech await you in this 12-minute downloadable podcast.
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My name is Josh Hollander, CEO of Horton International North America, an executive talent and recruitment firm.
Are you seeking talent for the next big Insurtech? Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuarhollander/
Saturday Nov 07, 2020
Saturday Nov 07, 2020
Today's episode features Anurag Shah, CEO Aureus Analytics. Before raising his $5m Series A, he moved his family to the US and shifted the entire focus onto Insurance: "The whole industry is based on data, but data was just being neglected."
🤸🏽♂️On Corporate Resiliency and Engagement: “We’ve always found more value in people more committed to the cause, rather than looking at their past experience or educational qualifications. People who are willing to give you their best time and energy without some crazy upside for themselves.”
📲On Virtual Work: For certain tech team members it is easier for them to do the work than to communicate about it - in remote/virtual work he identified special cases to communicate on a more frequented and focused basis.
👩👦On Customer Care: Aureus has not turned over a single customer-to-date due to relentless focus on their needs and the product development
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My name is Josh Hollander, CEO of Horton International North America, an executive talent and recruitment firm.
Are you seeking talent for the next big Insurtech? Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuarhollander/
Friday Oct 23, 2020
Friday Oct 23, 2020
As a leader, how do you do something meaningful an authentic with Diversity & Inclusion? Rather than doing some empty letter to shareholders, Max Drucker went deep in 2020 with his employees and realized quickly that more diverse ideas will make his company better. So he has fundamentally re-mapped the way his company creates roles and hires people.
Four key lessons in today’s 12-minute podcast:
🔀 How to Hard Pivot your company when the landscape shifts
🔫 How to be transparent with employees when you have no choices left
💪🏾 Why to listen for the small things when looking at solving something as complex as diversity longer-term
🗣 Best practices engaging your Independent Board to provide tangible value
The red thread spanning Max Drucker’s more than twenty years of creating and leading companies is this: he cares about his employees. He listens to them and makes his companies truly great places to work.
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My name is Josh Hollander, CEO of Horton International North America, an executive talent and recruitment firm.
Are you seeking talent for the next big Insurtech? Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuarhollander/
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To learn more about Max Drucker:
About Carpe Data: https://carpe.io/carpe-data-named-to-insurtech-100-list/
Connect here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxdrucker/
Friday Oct 09, 2020
Friday Oct 09, 2020
The incredibly dynamic Phil Reynolds, CEO Britecore, founded the one of the world’s first and most successful core insurance platforms. From Silicon Valley, right? No, from Missouri.
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Today’s guest built a team, a product, and helped shape what was to become Insurtech. This incredibly dynamic leader sets the standard for being ahead of the trends, global entrepreneurship, and just genuinely being a thoughtful leader.
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Today you can learn how to hire the most talented engineers on a global scale by running a code challenge. How to bootstrap your company and create demand for the higher-version product. How to create a compelling storyline for a successful Series A capital raise. Why and how to take your company fully remote/virtual (he did it 4 years ago!) and manage across time zones.
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My name is Josh Hollander and I’m CEO of Horton International North America, an executive talent and recruitment firm.
Are you seeking talent for the next big Insurtech? Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuarhollander/
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To learn more about Phil Reynolds:
About Britecore: https://www.britecore.com/case-studies
Connect here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/phillipreynolds/